122 - Stop Trying to Eliminate Suffering

Secular Buddhism

Noah Rasheta

Spirituality, Buddhism, Mindfulness, Society & Culture, Meditation, Secular, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if the problem with suffering is the idea we have that we shouldn't suffer? Suffering is a word that has become synonymous with the core Buddhist teachings of the 4 Noble Truths. What if our understanding of those teachings has been tainted because of our views of what it means to suffer? In this episode, I will talk about suffering and unsatisfactoriness and how the latter makes more sense to me in terms of Buddhist practice.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.
0:04.4	This is episode number 122. I am your host Noah Rochetta and today I'm going to talk about the
0:11.3	problem with suffering. Keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a
0:20.3	Buddhist. You can use this to learn to be a better whatever you already are. So let's get started
0:27.2	with a discussion around the Khoan that I shared in the last podcast episode. This is where a monk
0:34.3	asked Tozon when he was weighing some flags. What is Buddha? Tozon said, this flags weighs three
0:42.0	pounds. Now this is a this is a Khoan that I really enjoy because as I've mentioned before the
0:49.9	the whole point of these Khoans at times seems to be for me at least that they're trying to get us
0:57.1	out of conceptual thinking and back into the experiential, into the present moment. And that's
1:04.2	exactly what this Khoan does. It's like you're in the middle of weighing some flags and someone says,
1:10.9	what is Buddha? That's a concept. It's an idea but you know what's real? This flags weighs three
1:17.6	pounds. And that's exactly what the monk was was teaching in this Khoan and I think it's a
1:23.2	really fun and a simple and a profound lesson that the questions that we ask sometimes,
1:31.6	sometimes it's the question that's the problem. In other words, sometimes the absurdity of the
1:36.4	question merits an answer like this. You know, there's another Khoan that the whole Khoan says,
1:43.5	what is the color of wind? And that to me it's like well you could wrestle with that question all day
1:50.6	but if you fail to understand that the problem with that is the question itself that's just the
1:56.2	wrong question. It's an absurd question but we do that. We have questions and they entertain
2:02.6	the thoughts in our minds and they distract us from the experiential and this Khoan is one of
2:08.6	those invitations to bring us back to reality. And in this specific case reality is that this
2:15.7	flags weighs three pounds. So I like this. It reminds me to stay mindful of the questions that I'm
2:24.0	entertaining. Now I think I've mentioned this in a previous podcast episode but one of the things
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Noah Rasheta, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Noah Rasheta and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.